1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a real stream processing system capable of realizing the stream playback for playbacking data while transferring data.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has become increasingly popular to use the stream playback for playbacking data in real time while transferring data from a server rather than downloading data transferred from a server first and then playbacking the downloaded data.
In the case of the stream playback, the playback can be started as soon as the transfer of data from the server starts, so that a user on the client machine side does not have to be kept waiting and there is no need to provide a large capacity storage device on the client machine side so that it is possible to simplify the hardware configuration of the client machine side. There is also a merit that it is possible to prevent the unauthorized secondary use of the downloaded data.
For these reasons, the wider spread of the stream playback is expected in conjunction with the advance of the broadband technology in future.
The stream data transferred from the server are just ordinary time series data, and the stream data themselves do not have any information for identifying data or information on data characteristics. For this reason, it has been difficult to realize a selection of a specific part of the stream data in an attempt to select and playback only a selected part of the stream data.